By: Jeff Peckham Cassandra Wilson is a visionary vocalist who fundamentally reshaped the landscape of modern jazz by expanding its sonic vocabulary and repertoire. Known for her distinctive, smoky contralto voice and genre-blurring style, she broke the traditional mold of the jazz diva. By incorporating elements of blues, country, folk, and pop into her music,…
By: Robert Bruce On September 12, 1840, just a day before her twenty-first birthday, pianist Clara Wieck was married to her longtime beau, the thirty-year old composer, Robert Schumann. The two had met in Leipzig when Robert began studying piano with Clara’s father, Friederick Wieck, a well-known professional pianist and teacher. Over the course of…
By: Pam DeVier “I simply cannot understand how people can live without work, and how many of them do, especially the higher aristocracy… I despise them because of this.” – Dora Pejačević, from a letter to her friend, Baroness Rosa Lumbe-Mladota, written during or immediately after World War I. (Pejačević spent the war working directly on…
By: Jeff Peckham The original Birdland jazz club opened on December 15, 1949, at 1678 Broadway in Manhattan, just north of Times Square. The venue was founded by a syndicate led by Morris Levy, Irving Levy, and Oscar Goodstein. They named the club in honor of alto saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, who was the defining…
By: Jeff Peckham Al Jarreau was a virtuoso vocalist who redefined the boundaries of jazz, pop, and R&B. Over a career spanning five decades, his unique vocal style and elastic range earned him international acclaim. He remains the only artist to win Grammy Awards in three separate categories: jazz, pop, and R&B. Born Alwin Lopez…
By: Quinn Riley Known as “The Father of American Music,” Stephen Collins Foster was born in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1826, during the celebration of America’s 50th birthday. Coincidentally, it was also the same day two of America’s Founding Fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, passed away. Though not born into a musical family,…
By: Jeff Peckham On August 12, 1958, a 27-year-old Sonny Rollins eagerly answered a morning call to gather outside an East 126th Street brownstone for a freelance Esquire magazine photo shoot. Having grown up in central Harlem surrounded by his musical idols, the acclaimed tenor saxophonist jumped at the chance to stand alongside his contemporaries…
By: Jomar Cruz It’s the early 2000s, and an eight-year-old boy is watching his older brother playing a role-playing videogame called Final Fantasy VII, sometimes for hours. To him, the cuboidal pixel graphics were stunning, the characters were unique, and the music was unlike anything else he had ever heard. How could a soundtrack for…
By: Jeff Peckham While the 1930s and 40s were defined by the “King of Swing” Benny Goodman and the sophistication of Duke Ellington, no musician captured the American zeitgeist quite like Glenn Miller. His signature “Miller Sound”—characterized by a clarinet-led reed section—became the literal soundtrack to the World War II era, bridging the gap between…
By: Chris Arroyo Born in the southwest of France to a family that wasn’t particularly musical, Gabriel Fauré never intended to become one of the pre-eminent voices of French music. He wrote very few large-scale works, among them two operas, a handful of orchestral pieces and a Requiem. However, the bulk of his oeuvre (as…
